


The Darkness Trapped Within a Wheel

by runsinthefamily



Series: Purgatory [14]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Leviathan - Freeform, Purgatory, trueform!Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-28 00:13:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/668081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <img/>
</p><p>Image is from a stock clip at http://www.stock-clip.com</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Darkness Trapped Within a Wheel

**Author's Note:**

> Image is from a stock clip at http://www.stock-clip.com

Even held in the warm, weird non-feathers of Cas' wings, Dean can feel the chill of the water. Lightbulb is tucked beneath his chin, casting light into the tight cocoon that is all that Dean can see. Wings on three sides, the velvet grey of Cas' skin on the other. It stirs and flexes above him as Cas pushes through the caves, searching for the portal that he says he can feel down here. Pectoral muscles stretch, contract and stretch again. Cas has no nipples, which, Dean supposes, is not really a surprise. Hard to imagine where angels fit in the mammalian spectrum. 

Dean feels small, cradled, safe. It really seems like he should resent that, but he can't summon the will to try. Just as when Cas had stepped into the lightless, freezing water and held out his broomstick arms and cupped, whispering wings, Dean hadn't bothered to argue. He'd only stepped forward into the proffered embrace, closing his eyes. Cas had folded about him with a sigh and slipped beneath the surface.

 _ **Dean,**_ says Cas, _**Are you well?**_

"Peachy," Dean mutters. 

_**I think we are drawing close.**_ Cas sounds wary. 

"Problems?" 

_**I can't be sure. The whole of this place reeks of -** _

There is an abrupt jolt and Cas reverses, throwing Dean sideways and then against the oven-warmth of Cas' skin. The wings rearrange around Dean. He is pressed firmly against Cas, his cocoon made smaller as one wing unfolds, scythes away through the water. Something roars in pain and fury. Cas' ribs expand against Dean's torso and legs. Another jolt, Cas contracting in on himself, shielding Dean with his whole body. Dean struggles briefly, trying to reach his knife. 

**_Take a deep breath, Dean_** , says Cas. 

Dean, assisted by adrenaline, takes four short, hyperventilating ones and then a deep, lung-filling, belly breath, nods shortly against Cas' chest. The other wing falls away and the water rushes in, seizes him, shocks him almost senseless with cold. Cas' arms catch him up, a hand cradles the back of his head, and then Cas beats his wings through the water and they shoot forward.

The thing, whatever it is, roars again. Lightbulb throbs against Dean's collarbone, bleeding light and heat against him. _We're running,_ he thinks, astonished. _What could make Cas run?_

He cannot see. The water is too achingly cold for him to even try to open his eyes, not to mention the bruising pressure of it as Cas forces them along at speed. If it weren't for Cas' inhuman grip he would have been ripped free immediately. He presses his mouth and nose against Cas, focusing on not breathing, not breathing.

Cas cries out, their mad headlong flight is arrested with a bonerattling jerk, and Dean feels Cas' fingers loosen. Panic floods him even as water floods between the two of them. Light bursts into being, red through Dean's closed eyelids. Familiar light. Grace. Then Cas is gone, and Dean is adrift and sinking. 

"Cas!" he screams, stupidly. Water in his mouth, in his ears, freezing him alive. His eyes are open, he knows, but all he sees is a blur of white somewhere above and darkness everywhere else. 

Cas shrieks, his Voice like a drill, and the whiteness explodes into brilliance. 

There is Cas, alight and shining like a star, angel blade out. One of his - oh, jesus, one of his heads is gone, just gone, and he is bleeding light like blood out into the water. Around him is a tattered shroud of oily not-light. Dean can't call it dark, or even black. It is an absence, a negation. Where it blocks his vision of the angel it swallows all the light and leaves him with the queasy feeling that he is looking at a rip in the world, beyond which is nothingness, a vast emptiness more complete than the space between the stars.

Dean kicks, struggles in the water, pushes upward. His boots feel like cement, his coat is a leaden weight. _Please_ , he prays, to whom he doesn't know. His only salvation, the only mercy and grace he has even known is dying right in front of him, but he prays anyway. _Please._ His vision is dimming, his chest throbs with the need for air. 

A single note, barely heard over the combat. Dean turns his head, desperate. Lightbulb shoots toward him like a falling star and impacts dead center in Dean's breastbone. 

_Set me as a seal upon your heart._

Clarity and strength shoot through Dean. He kicks once, powerfully, up and forward, through a closing gap in the thing's substance and fetches up against Cas' side. 

_**Dean,**_ Cas cries, pained and fearful.

Back in the world, it would have been so much harder, given mortal flesh and the limits of earthly physics. Here, in the shifting morass that is Purgatory, it only requires a certain point of view. Dean takes hold of Cas' hand, the spread of those elongated fingers wide enough to span his chest, and pushes it _in._

When Grace and soul contact one another, everything just - goes.


End file.
